Recently, there has been an upsurge in the use of residential Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 802.11 wireless networks to provide a distribution medium between homes in a neighborhood. This wireless connectivity may be provided over so-called social channels, defined by Wi-Fi Direct. User devices may scan the social channels to discover other user devices or wireless access points (APs) with which to synchronize.
User devices may use a large amount of power or time in scanning if several social channels must be scanned. Accordingly, there is a general need to define a primary social channel that user devices scan first, and on which a user device may initialize a neighbor awareness network (NAN) if the user device scan discovers that there are no APs or NANs already operating on the social channels.